The Editing

Oh dear. Well, problem one: I wasn't holding the microphone close enough in the first round of vox pops. It recorded, but in playing them back on Audacity, I discovered a lack of waveforms appearing on the screen. I still had sound, I knew what was said, but editing those grabs was monumentally painful without those helpful squiggles.

I discovered on Audacity useful shortcut keys. Space bar will play the highlighted section, or from the cursor, again and again. And holding down shift and clicking to either side of the highlighted part will extend it just that much. And using the arrow keys will move the cursor along, so I can get it back to start of the track easily. The markers though, known as the "label track" was sometimes useful. Not as good as NewsBoss there, I think. Maybe I need more practice with it.

I also discovered useful features to make the sound quality better. There is the "silence" button, to get rid of noise but keep the time. There is the "fade in/out", to make transition smoother, and also to soften background noise without losing it entirely and ruining flow. And the "amplify" feature, thank goodness! It helped me reduce louder portions of grabs, and also adjust all the grabs from the first round to reach the same volume level as the second round. And after doing this, I discovered that this is the way to make those waveforms appear, at least a little bit. Too late to be useful. >:P

Also, the decisions t0 use which of the grabs came easily. There were a few good ones, and then there were those that didn't have me talking over the top of people. And I wanted that range of voices, and it also gave me a range of responses.

When I finally put together the five grabs that I'd loosely cut the words I wanted from it, lo and behold, it was about 45 seconds. That was awesome. :)

Then came a period of tweaking to get flow, making use of fade/out a lot, and I'm pretty happy with the finished product, despite having my voice in it at one point. It was unavoidable however, that last man's response was too good not to use.